Actions and Overlays: A DIY

Yesterday I discovered something I had never heard of. I don't own Photoshop at this point, but I will be required to buy it in college for class. Because of the fact that I don't own it I don't know about a lot of the random things you can buy for Photoshop. But today I found some tutorials on Pinterest that I was interested in doing and translating from PS to Gimp. One happened to be on a photographer's site (which I won't list because I'm about to throw-down on the majority of modern day photographers and dumb things people now buy and that'd be kind of mean to just single out one that I happened to find.) and I started to look at her tutorials. This actually happened to be the inspiration behind making this blog. Do you know what I discovered there? Most of the tutorials told the people that for the photos she had bought a bundle at some site to create the effects and all you did was hit play. I thought it was kind of weird so I looked at the video she had explaining it. And literally you just hit the one you want and press a play button I had never heard of (but again I don't own PS) and it creates the effect you want. I thought "Wow, you actually pay money for that? I wouldn't blow the probably $30 you spent to create that when I can spend $0 to create something similar in Gimp.

And as I flipped through her before and after shots I remembered something my uncle who was a photography major told me. Something along the lines of "That's the problem with a lot photographers now. They take a mediocre picture and fix it up in Photoshop until it's nothing like they started out with." And as I stared at the photos I had to agree. The pictures to start with were mediocre and ended up nice looking through probably a lot of editing. One was even obviously heavily edited to the point of looking like a woman standing in front of a backdrop. Now, I'm not going to say my photography is perfect. Far from it, and I do edit my photos when I take them to fix lighting and skin, but usually I try not to go too heavy if I'm trying for a natural picture. And I also love the look of the fake retro vintage photos, but it's getting kind of old with that being the only type I seem to be seeing anymore. But I'm not opposed to them so I decided to check out the site she got her bundles from. Yikes! All of the bundles were in the hundreds! You got several overlays, but is it worth dropping $235 on it? Not for me. I'm already cringing at the idea of buying PS let alone any extensions when I can use Gimp and get the extensions free. 

And this brings us to the point of the post. I looked at those overpriced bundles and thought, "Wait. You can do that in five minutes with a free tutorial or plug in for Gimp. Why would you pay?" And my mother proceeded to hear me rant about it for about half an hour at lunch time. So I decided to look at how to do it myself, and low and behold I remembered I had installed G'mic about a month back and never got around to looking at what it actually did. Boy am I glad I did. Seriously if you're looking at getting Gimp or already have it I highly suggest getting G'mic. You can download it here, and I don't think you'll regret it. It boasts 615 filters. For free. Pretty much everything you could ask for is right there in a free easy to use package. It has a vintage filter which is what i was searching for, but it has plenty more that make Gimp a lot easier to use if you don't have time to figure out how to do it yourself. The settings are all adjustable and you can layer it all.
*UPDATE* I also found a script that works pretty marvelously for making a vintage effect. It can be found here. I'm using it in my first video tutorial which will be coming hopefully soon. -6/13/14

But now for the tutorial part! This one took some playing around with color layers. Feel free to do the same to get a different style. I went for something between the cool and warm vintage colors, but once I hit it I fell in love. If you want to get a general idea of the vintage look sans a plug-in here's how:

*Note this tutorial was done in Gimp 2.8.10 using the new single window mode under Windows 

Step 1: Open your image. I'm using one I took a few years ago of a friend with a very friendly butterfly we named Sandy. 

Step 2: Open your new layer. As a general rule I don't work on my main image. Ever. If I need to work specifically on the image I duplicate it. 

Step 3: The new layer doesn't have to be transparent. It doesn't matter what color it is as we're going to change it anyways. 

 Step 4: The colors are kind of tricky. It took me a while to figure out just what ones I wanted to give the right effect. On this picture I'm using f4b584 for the first. 

Step 5: You can either accomplish this by using the bucket tool and clicking on the image or by dragging the color from the Foreground and Background color tab. 

Step 6: Okay I used four different colors. In this order it was f4b584 ; 307396 ; a791de ; f4b5b2 ; without the ;'s. The first was the tan-ish orange, then a dark blue, a medium light purple, and then a pink-ish tinged color. The order does matter because of the Mode effects. 

Step 7: Adjust the opacity on each layer. This is important to determine how much each color affects the image and how much of the image shows through. I used 20.1 for layer 1, 63.2 for layer 2, 3.3 for layer 3, and 15.4 for layer 4. The more you play with the opacity the more the image will change. Different combinations give fun affects so experiment! 

Step 8: Now to change the Mode. Again this changes the overall look of the picture. (Not going to lie I forgot to adjust the opacity when I took the screenshot.) For my picture I used Normal on layer 1, Lighten Only on layer 2 and 3, and Overlay on layer 4. But as I said these can be adjusted to give some interesting affects to your picture. 

Step 8: Pat yourself on the back. You just saved yourself hundreds by taking a bit of time to do it yourself. This can be used to make a lot of different affects not just a vintage one. I'm interested in doing it to mix a set of tans and browns like one of the pictures I saw on the photographer's site. 

Feel free to comment if you have any questions about what I did or anything. I'm thinking about setting the tutorials to either Mondays and Thursdays or Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'll be making a Pinterest board just for my tutorials in Gimp so feel free to check it out when I get it up. Happy Gimping! 

-Lots of love from the Gimpess